Weekly topical lesson plans

This is a link to a page of resources for a textbook series I like, Inside Out. Amongst other things, you can sign up for a weekly topical lesson plan for adult and young adult ESL/EFL learners.

http://www.insideout.net/resources/index.htm

Thirty Years of TEFL

Here's a link to an article by Jack Richards summarising changes in approaches to teaching English over the last 30 years. The big picture!

http://www.professorjackrichards.com/pdfs/30-years-of-TEFL.pdf

English Next - the future of English as a world language

English Next by David Graddol is a great little book that examines the future of the English language. It's very readable and absolutely fascinating.

Here's a link to a downloadable PDF version of the book.

http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-research-english-next.pdf

Here's the blurb from the website:

"English Next was commissioned by the British Council and written by researcher David Graddol – a British applied linguist, well known as a writer, broadcaster, researcher and consultant on issues relating to global English. The report draws attention to the extraordinary speed of change to issues affecting English identified in the 1997 publication: The Future of English? The new report argues that we are already in a very new kind of environment and a new phase in the global development of English. What are the new rules and who will be the winners and who will be the losers? In this new study David Graddol suggests some of the answers by analysing demographic and economic trends in the Twenty First-Century which affect Global English and language policies worldwide and will influence its future.

Read English Next (1.89MB - PDF) and find out why global English may mean the end of English as a foreign language.

Link to Links

Here's a great page put together by Professor Emeritus Marty Levine at California State University at Northridge. There are links to lesson plans and resources for TESOL and bilingual educators, both K-12 and adult, as well as resources for foreign language teachers.

It has a useful section on professional organizations, jobs, and educational standards and frameworks.

http://www.csun.edu/~hcedu013/eslindex.html

Dave's ESL Cafe

Dave's ESL Cafe has been around for a long time. It's a great place to find resources, look for jobs, or discuss theory and practice. There are discussion boards for almost every possible TESOL related topic.

http://www.eslcafe.com/

Online Journal

The TESL-EJ (Teaching English as a Second Language Electronic Journal) has a wide variety of great articles. You can search the articles database from the main page.

http://tesl-ej.org/ej45/toc.html

Wiki Resources for TESOL instructors

Here's a link to a page of links to resources....

Some theory, some practice, some job-hunting and other professional resources

http://wikigogy.org/Main_page

Crossword Puzzle Maker

If you're wanting to help your students review lexis in an interesting way, you can use this online tool to generate crossword puzzles.

Better still, why not direct them to this site and have each student make their own crossword puzzle for other students to complete?

http://www.puzzle-maker.com/CW/

The culture of the United States

Here's a great website with lots of useful information about the culture of the United States. It's designed with international students in mind but is a great resource from anyone.

http://www.edupass.org/culture/

Varieties of British English

Here's a link to the British Library's dialect map. You can click and hear how English is pronounced differently around the country.

http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/

Did I Miss Anything?

And just because I like it....

Did I Miss Anything?

by Tom Wayman

Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered
but it was one place

And you weren't here

ERIC - Education Resources Information Center

Here is a link to ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center, a searchable online database of academic articles related to education. More than you could ever possibly need....

http://www.eric.ed.gov/

Newspaper materials

Here is a link to my favorite international newspapers' page for TESOL teachers. It's very good, but takes a very U.K. and European perspective.

Lots of news and views and some downloadable resources to use with your students.

http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/learningenglish

How words are really used....British National Corpus

If you want to find out how people really use words, check out the British National Corpus website.... You can plug in words, and it will show you all the instances of that word use in the corpus.

http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

Academic Vocabulary

For those of you working with college-bound students, here is a link to Averil Coxhead's Academic Word List.

http://language.massey.ac.nz/staff/awl/

The list contains 570 word families but does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English. The AWL was primarily made so that it could be used by teachers as part of a programme preparing learners for tertiary level study or used by students working alone to learn the words most needed to study at tertiary institutions.

Stephen Krashen's Website

Here is a link to Stephen Krashen's website.

http://www.sdkrashen.com/

Stephen Krashen is probably the most influential Second Language Acquistion theorist of the past few decades. If you're interested in Second Language Acquisition theory and how it translates into practice, this is the place for you.

Resources for K-12 teachers of English language learners

Here's a link to Dr Jill Mora's website. She is a K-12 teacher educator and her site has a lot of resources for teachers that work with K-12 students. Much of it is quite theoretical, but she also has some Powerpoint presentations and documents from the various classes she teaches. Well worth looking at.

http://coe.sdsu.edu/people/jmora/Default.htm

After August 31, 2008 her site will move to this address
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/jmora

English Language Teaching Forum Online

Here is a link to the Department of State Office of English Language Programs online magazine, English Language Teaching Forum. It´s always worth reading and has a wealth of useful and interesting articles on a whole range of topics.

http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/

Great online groups for teacher educators

Anybody who works in teacher education or development should join these two great groups, both of which can send out a daily digest of the online discussions. They are run through the special interest sections of IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language).

The first is TTEdSIG - Teacher Trainer & Educators Special Interest Group. You need to create a Yahoo profile to join, and I think you´re supposed to be a member of IATEFL.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ttedsig/

The second is Young Learners SIG.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/younglearners/

This is a pretty active list, so if you sign up to receive messages, I recommend choosing the daily digest version.

Learning Technology Resources

Here are links to Nik Peachey´s great blogs on learning technology for TESOL instructors and teacher educators.

http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/
http://quickshout.blogspot.com/

Just as a sampler of the kind of stuff he posts about, here are links to a few of his most recent posts together with his comments.


I've been doing some training for teachers on how to create their own
RSS reader / Personal homepage using Netvibes. This is a real time
saver to help keep you up to date. You can download a step by step task
list that you can either use yourself or to train other teachers from
here:
http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/07/creating-personal-homepage.html


For those of you who have students that like music have a look at this.
It is a posting on how to use an online Karaoke site to help your
students develop their English.
http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/07/karaoke-with-social-network.html


This week I have also started naming my sources of information, so
those of you who are interested in doing some research yourselves and
finding your own useful sites have a look at this:
http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/07/naming-my-sources-part-1.html


On my Quick shout blog, I've also been reviewing a number of resources.

Google's new 3D virtual world Lively
http://quickshout.blogspot.com/2008/07/googles-lively-competitor-with-second.html

The wonderful encyclopedia of life on Earth
http://quickshout.blogspot.com/2008/07/encyclopedia-of-life.html

A site that helps you to create your own SMS groups
http://quickshout.blogspot.com/2008/07/create-your-own-sms-groups.html

SnapYap, a site to enable you to send video messages
http://quickshout.blogspot.com/2008/07/send-free-video-messages.html

I've also added some more new second Life tutorials
http://quickshout.blogspot.com/2008/07/more-second-life-tutorials.html

Lastly for anyone involved in training journalists, or even anyone who
wants some motivating tasks for their students, there's some
information here on how to become a 'citizen journalist'
http://quickshout.blogspot.com/2008/07/becoming-citizen-journalist.html

All amazing stuff! What´s needed now is a robot that can check them all out for us, learn how to use them, and then write a software program that we can upload to a specialized device embedded in our brains. This too shall come!